1. Technical Field
The embodiments herein generally relate to a computer search program and processing of data across on a computer network, and more particularly, to identification of name entities via search, determination of alternative searches, and automatic integration of data across a computer network for dynamic generation of information via portals, etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a business organization, there are three aspects of what typically affects data that users seek on their enterprise network. The factors viz. Users & their tacit knowledge and their intention in terms of what they seek, types of artifacts embedded with data that maps to what user seeks, and actions on the data that leads to creation, modification and deletion of artifacts.
Firstly, users, user groups & their tacit knowledge typically consist of users who could be experts or non-experts at a task, new to the team or old team members. Often users are mobile and travel from location to location, and therefore their data needs change accordingly. Users also change roles or move to new roles due to transfers, promotions, etc. and often require different data. Thus, for a particular network information system, the users often need to memorize and update oneself about where, which programs are located and how their inner structures such as menus, etc. work to perform an action, especially in a scenario where hundreds of programs are available. Actions may be something as simple as update a phone number or create a large proposal in response to a complex requirement of a customer. These actions are typically enabled in an enterprise as web services.
Typically, normal users and/or business users for a business context, access a lot of data, often repeatedly, from a range of web-enabled or web based enterprise programs on a day-to-day basis. These users are expected to learn and acquire significant amount of data such as which programs are required for which business operation in which situation and which order, where are all these programs in the enterprise web and how to locate them, how to use these programs, again in which situation, etc. Such tacit knowledge of programs is likely to require updating whenever user's role or location changes or the programs themselves change.
FIG. 1 illustrates a system view 100 of users 102 communicating with multiple programs 106 through an integration layer 104 via a network. The users 102 retrieve the data from multiple programs 106. But, when there is a change and/or update in the data for any of the activity performed on at least one of the program, the users 102 find it difficult to locate the relevant data from the various programs, especially where a user lacks the tacit knowledge to navigate For instance a new employee with average expertise at performing a task could be required to create a complex artifact by accessing different types of content from across the enterprise that are supposedly relevant to context of his/her task and further, locate specific actions within any of these programs to create a new piece of data.
FIG. 2 illustrates a user interface view of a portal 200 associated with a customer 202. The customer profile of a user (e.g., John Doe) is associated with multiple business contexts. Here, multiple business contexts may include customer's (e.g., John Doe) contact data 204, reviews 206, call report emails 208, investments 210, weekly trend and recent statement 212 and a calendar 214. The contact data 204 includes customer's mail ID, address and a contact data number. The review report 206 provides a report of survey associated with the customer (e.g., John Doe) in the recent years. The call report email 208 includes the data the communication associated with various activities. The investment 210 provides the details of a financial transaction associated with the customer 202. The weekly trend and recent statements 212 provides the up-to-date data and a status associated with that customer. The calendar 214 provides the date of particular activity being carried out by the customer. The information portal 200 provides an easy view of data associated with a customer. But, at the same time, needs to include a new program in the portal page, thus contributing to more time, and effort to update taxonomy, build new pages, and retrain users over a significant period of time, often running in months.
For example, if a business user has to submit a proposal to Proposal system enterprise program, he/she has to view projects where similar case studies and different business documents are located and collect data to prepare a proposal in response to a Request for Proposal. Often for these actions, user is required to access multiple programs where one is not necessarily aware of the other in terms of a common business context, that spans multiple departments, multiple users, multiple types of artifacts and multiple types of actions.
FIG. 3A-3B illustrates a user interface view 300A-300B of a search associated with a customer profile. The user interface view 300A of the search includes a user search term field 302, and the search results field 304. The user search term field 302 includes a user search term inputted by a user. The users 102 may enter a user search term associated with a customer.
The search results displayed contains heavy text data that are cumbersome to browse. The common approach to avoid memorizing navigation is to mark these addresses as bookmarks or Favorites within a web browser. In certain cases where the data inside programs is not available at a fixed location as indicated by its address such as a URL, where the programs consist of dynamically rendered page (in a session) with a series of data transformations and layouts. Also, the data shown in search results may not be up-to date due to a lack of real time indexing of the content by the search engine.
There is also a situation where the user searches for something and is shown too many results 304 as shown in FIG. 3A or no results 306 as shown in FIG. 3B. This could be due to a poor description or user inputted search term OR the search term is very broad leading to a very large number of matches. Often in such situations, the solution is to offer suggestions under the common ‘Did you Mean’ title where the user is presented alternative spelling for the user inputted terms or a related set of synonyms for that search term available in a ready reference such as a static thesaurus. The user may not find these suggestions relevant to his or her intention.
In short, there lies a problem for users of a network information system to effectively and efficiently access and utilize the data and applications associated with that data available on that particular network information system. Users have to typically acquire and memorize the location and use of web service applications in order to use them.